Seizing the Dawn
by ohponthavemercy
Summary: The first time she insulted him, it took him by surprise. E/É oneshot.


The first time she insulted him, it took him by surprise.

It was at one of the meetings in the room above the bar. The candlelight was hazy liquid amber that seeped into his bones, and he was drunker off the roars that accompanied his clambering onto the table than off the wine that was being freely distributed amongst his friends – most likely Grantaire's work.

"My friends, can we stand here with our drinks –"

"And our ladies!" Grantaire bellowed, much to the pleasure of his listeners, his arm around a pretty waitress with the curves of an hourglass with about as much substance in her head as one.

"Yes, yes, yes," Enjolras waved the comment away like it was a particularly bothersome fly, before starting up again. "Can we stand here, my friends, when there is such injustice, such inequality in our streets, in the very bones of our beloved Paris? Can we stand here, and yet claim to be men of honor, men of action, when the people of Paris weep in the night? Weep from hunger, weep for a day that comes and yet lacks the hope of dawn?"

"No!" The men yelled in response, their voices ringing in his ears and melding with the rush of blood in his ears.

"No, we cannot! So what will we do, my brothers? What can we do? We will seize that dawn they long for, we will make them beg for mercy as we bring those tyrants to their knees, we will bring that hope to their doorsteps and lay it at their feet," he proclaimed. He spoke of heroism, of socialism, of honor and valor, of the empathy that tugs at his heartstrings for the people of France, for his people. He spoke of the patriotism that runs like blood, that roils in the veins of every citizen. He quoted the works of Locke, Montesquieu – who, he remarked, despite having been a rather conservative fellow, had a brilliant idea in his separation of powers - and Rousseau. "_ L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers. _"

It was a fine speech, he knew, and that was what Combeferre told him afterward, when he dragged Enjolras down to a table in the back afterwards.

"I think that was one of your best," 'Ferre said, planting a bottle before him. There was a soft noise from behind them, nearly inaudible in the din of the room, but Enjolras could have sworn it was a scoff. "Go on, congratulate yourself. You deserve a little relaxation. And don't tell me that injustice never relaxes, so you shouldn't either," he scolded, before Enjolras could protest. And then Combeferre dove back into the mess of drunken humanity, leaving him alone.

There was a sneeze, and he jumped a little in the wooden seat, turning. It was a girl, half-hidden in the shadows – or perhaps she was shadow herself, Enjolras noted, eyes skimming over hair that rippled in waves over her shoulders like the waters of the Seine, over skin that had been tanned by sun and darkened by the dust of Parisian streets, and met eyes dark as night.

"Oh, pardon me, mademoiselle. I didn't notice you there," he apologized.

She snorted a little in a very unladylike fashion. "Don't trouble yourself over it, monsieur. No one ever does."

He sat up straighter, more comfortable now that there was someone to share his marvelous ideas with. "They will in the new Republic. Everyone will be noticed and cared for, and we will all be equals." The look she gave him was indulgent, but dubious. "You don't agree, mademoiselle? Don't you wish for something like that?"

"_ Quel banane _," she sighed, not to the ceiling, but to her own feet. "Of course I do. But pretty words don't fill stomachs, and poetry does not build barricades, and all of your flowery Latin does not _do anything _, little rebel."

"My speeches are not just _pretty words_," he scoffed, a little offended. "My words will stir people to action, and I mean to see that it happens." He painted a picture for her, of his plans towards a new Republic, a picture of their barricade erected on the hopes of the people and his own ideas, glorious and shining like the sun. His voice grows stronger as he gesticulates, until it's nearly a shout of joy, a cry for revolution.

She just snorted. "As pretty as it sounds, monsieur, your barricade is not built on words. It is not built on ideas. It is built on blood – yours, little rebel, are you willing to give that?"

"If my country needs it, I would bleed on the flag to keep it red," Enjolras vowed. And he meant every word. She tilted her head, considering, a sort of grim respect in her eyes, before she continued.

"But one man alone? Not even you can fight a war by yourself. Who will fight with you, little rebel? That drunkard, singing his fool ass off?" She gestured vaguely to Grantaire. "Your clumsy friend in the corner?" Bossuet had spilled his wine yet again all over a white shirt – his last one, judging from the groans. "Lovesick Marius?" Pontmercy was talking about his blond angel again to anyone who would listen – which was, actually, no one, but he didn't care.

But these were his friends, and Enjolras had believed implicitly in them, even Bahorel, who was admittedly with them only for the larks and laughter. "They will, and the people will rise with us."

"So you say," she hummed, her fingers drumming across the tabletop restlessly.

"Alongside us, they will fight for their own rights, for their equality!"

She shook her head. "_ Idiot _. It is more complicated than that."

"I –" He started, but she cut him off. Her eyes flashed as she moved into the light, palms on the surface of the table, flashed like he imagined a lioness' must when she leapt into the African sun and pounced onto a gazelle.

"Listen to me. Wars, little rebel," she growled at him, staring him down, "wars, they are built on blood and sweat and tears. And they aren't noble and heroic like all your golden fairy tales – they are rough and dirty and you will be_astonished _at the cruelty of man."

"How do you know so much about war?" He asked, and to his extreme horror, he sounded a little – dare he say it – _breathless _. Ruffled, even. The heat, perhaps. Summer in Paris could be atrocious. He considered loosening his cravat.

Her laugh was smoke and watered wine, rain spilling onto pavements and firelight. "I'm not you. I live on the streets, not in some respectable flat paid for by my papa," she spat, before leaning in. She was so close that he could see the flecks of gold in her irises, could nearly taste the wine on her breath, "You don't understand, little rebel boy, and until you know this, you are no help to France: living is a war, every day. How can you help us when you don't understand the basic rules of our lives, little rebel?"

With that, she suddenly left, and he blinked a little at the abrupt loss of her warmth – _how does someone so skinny radiate that much heat, like a fire? _– before glancing around, half-rising from his seat, trying to find her in the crowd, but she'd melted into them, gone like she was never there.

He sat back down and looked down at the bottle, toyed with the slick green glass, confused. Nobody had ever challenged him like that – debated, maybe, but not like that. Enjolras spoke with the passion of the revolutionary idealist, spoke with the fervor of someone who believed with every breath what he said, but she spoke like her life depended on it. Everyone else in the room had fallen under the spell of his words, and yet she had been shaking her head in disdain.

Combeferre returned, cheeks rosy with drink, his eyes sparkling merrily. "Grantaire's singing again, we should stop him before he starts to dance – what's with the long face? You haven't had any wine." His voice was warm with concern – typical 'Ferre, always guiding everyone, the philosophical rock to Enjolras' rebellion.

Enjolras glanced up, ruffling his curls distractedly. "Did you see someone back here, before?"

"Just that girl always trailing Marius – I think she takes letters for him to that girl," Combeferre shrugged. "I think her name's Éponine. Why?"

"Nothing. I just thought I heard something," Enjolras waved it away, and spent the rest of the night wondering why on earth the opinion of one little dirt-smudged gamine who spoke French far too educated and pretty for someone like her bothered him so much, and why on earth he kept revising new and improved arguments.

The second time he saw her was after he'd been passing out pamphlets with Marius. The Bonapartist had run off somewhere afterwards, leaving Enjolras to walk alone down the street. Not that he minded, really – something about drifting anonymously through the people, without Jehan's poetry or Joly's worries that he was catching the plague or something pathetic like that or Marius' musings on how beautiful his love – Colette? Juliette? (If it had been Antoinette, R had joked, Enjolras would have well and truly been scandalized) – but without all those distractions, he could think.

Which was why it startled him so when a horse had bugled at a young child playing in the street – or more truthfully, the lithe figure who had darted in front of the child, pushing him out of harm's way to the sidewalk.

"Watch it, vermin!" The driver called down loftily. The gamine who had saved the child glared upwards at him. It was the defiant way she held her head, the proud tilt of her chin, that Enjolras recognized.

"Watch where you're going, _baser _," Éponine yelled back, the boy peering out from around her hip. Her voice was well-suited to rage, Enjolras thought absently as he made his way towards her. It was low and raspy, more growl than purr, more rough velvet and strong coffee than smooth silk and sun-warmed honey, unlike the goddess Marius described his lover as being._Cosette, that's her name _. "You could have run him over!"

"One less of you rats scurrying underfoot," the passenger, a fat old lawyer who had peered out the window, spat, before the driver gave his horse a flick with the whip. The beast cantered away, as Éponine screamed after them.

"_ Je t'emmerde _ !" She obviously had no qualms about cursing in front of a young child – her brother, Enjolras supposed, from the protective way her arm curled around his shoulders, ruffling his dirty curls affectionately, almost tenderly smiling down at him.

He finally reached her, touching her shoulder lightly. She whirled, her eyes icy and her mouth about to open, prepared to verbally abuse someone else. "Oh, it's just you, little rebel. What do you want?"

_Why am I here? What do I want? _Even he wasn't sure of the answer. "About last night…" he started, expecting the beginning of his renewed and strengthened argument, a long explanation, something noble and logical to make her see how wrong she'd been about his revolution, about him. But was she so wrong? He looked at the boy, at his wide blue eyes and the way his mouth curls as if long hours of grinning mischievously made it incapable of doing anything else, and then he looked at her and her skinny arms and tiny waist and the faint smudges of someone's handprint on her left cheekbone, and remembered her from moments ago, screaming at a man who would have ran her brother down. He looked around, at the prostitutes with their protruding collarbones and their dresses that showed too much, not just of skin but of their lack of hope; at the beggar who was coughing his lungs out on the corner, with his too-big eyes that didn't bother beseeching the passerby for help any more, but instead stared at the cobblestones. He'd always seen them, but he'd always grouped them into the l'abaisse, the downtrodden of Patria's children, not really thinking of them as individuals.

So when he opened his mouth, he said, "You're right. I don't understand." She raised her eyebrows, but remained silent, instead releasing the boy, who ran off. "But you know," he continued, "you could teach me."

"Okay," her smile was crooked in the glow of the dying day. He nodded, and turned away, thinking that was that, and wondering if anyone was at the café already.

"Little rebel boy," she called after him. He stopped, turning back.

"I have a name, you know," he told her. "It's Enjolras."

"Éponine," she replied. "And, walk with me."

"I'm sorry, what?" He crinkled his eyebrows in confusion. She was a few steps ahead of him already, and at his outburst, she looked back, planting her hands on her hips.

"You're going to the café, are you not? For another one of your meetings?" Enjolras nodded an affirmative.

"Then quit staring and come along._Idiot. _" She scoffed the latter in an undertone, shaking her head as she briskly walked along, and he had to lengthen his strides until he caught up with her.

He forgot she was in the back of the room when he started speaking, and it wasn't until afterwards, when she approached him at his usual out-of-the-way table, sliding into the seat beside him without any of the shyness the girls his mother always used to introduce him to possessed, that he remembered she had been there at all.

"Paris is not one of your pretty bourgeois girls, to be wooed and won and fought over," she had said that evening. "Paris is cruel. She starves her own children, lets them sleep under the stars without cloaks to keep them dry. You can't sweep that under the rug, little rebel – you cannot wash it and starch its clothes and feed it, expecting it to be tamed. It's not one of your fancy carriage horses, to be broken."

She brought him out into the streets one day – how she'd found him, he had no idea, but she seemed good at that kind of thing, and as the days went by he found he didn't care – and showed him what exactly she meant. She'd dragged them through the streets, through mud that clung to his ankles on his fine leather shoes, through alleys with whores catcalling and dogs with ribs protruding through their coats baring their fangs. Together they'd passed by communities of people living in such conditions Joly would have shuddered in horror and made ominous noises about the plague had he walked with them. He got used to following her around, seeing the city as she saw it.

One night, she'd brought him to see her brother, Gavroche, who lived in a giant statue of an elephant with other boys who were even younger than he.

"He ran away when he was old enough to," she'd explained flatly, without grief or anger. "It was for the best." She lapsed into silence then, and he remembered the time he had seen her with a handprint splayed across her cheekbones and bruises along her arms.

"Your father, he -"

She hadn't answered, but she'd thrown her head back, jutted her chin out, and dared him to pity her with her eyes.

"Why don't you run away?"

"What would my sister do?" She replied, her face darkening, like a cloud passing over the moon.

He gripped her wrists tightly. "Éponine, listen, if you – if you ever need anything, you can always find me." Suddenly, it was extremely important to him that she knew this.

Instead, she had been almost wearily amused. "You can't save everyone, little rebel," she'd said lightly, before gently tugging her hands away.

As strange as these "lessons" were, they worked. His speeches were getting finer, bolder, ever more fevered and emphatic, less filled with the dramatic definitions of yesterday. He did not shy away from the flaws of his beloved Patria – he embraced them. Everyone was starting to notice even grouchy old Professor Babinet, who was growing more and more astonished at his essays by the day.

"Cicero," Combeferre dubbed him.

"Apollo," Grantaire hailed him.

"_ Idiot _," she always called him. She was always insulting him, even if he was the better educated and more extensively read out of the two – she didn't seem to care about all that.

"_Baiseur_," she'd hissed, aggrieved, after one particularly passionate argument. When they were walking through the marketplace and someone had crashed into him, and he had held them up and apologized profusely before they had parted ways, she'd taken one look at him and said, "_Empoté _! You just let your wallet slip through your fingers." He'd done a thorough search of his pockets – she'd been right. But that night, after he had fallen asleep over his papers and his extremely worn copy of the first volume of Diderot's_Encyclopedia _, he'd woken up to find it, missing a sou or two, at his elbow, on top of his essay.

But he found, as the days went on and he endured more of these injuries, he didn't mind as much. And her tone as she continued these verbal abuses lost its sting: once, when he had turned around at her muttered, " _idiot _", he would have sworn her eyes were narrowed in exasperated affection. And even though it was a known fact she was in love with Marius, the fool, in those moments, he could have sworn otherwise, as she smiled so brightly it was a dagger in his ribs. And he found, to his greatest surprise, he didn't mind at all.

One day, they were arguing as usual, walking through the streets. He was yelling and gesticulating wildly, and she was snarling and snapping, stomping angrily on the worn cobblestones.

"You're so stubborn!" He'd yelled, tugging at his hair in frustration.

"You're so stupid!" She'd returned, her eyes narrowed. "When will you learn, little rebel, that you _cannot _save everyone?"

"I can try to save you!" He retorted, angrily, before he'd really known what he was saying. She froze in her tracks, bewildered. And he'd taken the opportunity of her stillness, she who was always pacing or in flight, with her gait that was more swaying dance than walk, and he'd leaned in close and pressed his lips against hers.

"_Idiot _," she'd gasped, once they'd broken apart.

Exasperated, he'd asked, "What is it now?"

"You should have done that long ago," she'd half-laughed, a little breathily.

"I – I thought you were in love with Marius."

It was a real laugh now, for a couple of notes. "I thought I was, but I wasn't. Maybe the idea of him, but not really him." She shook her head.

"Oh?" He arched an eyebrow.

"Shut up and forget Marius," she snorted, before leaning in again. She whispered, "Kiss me again, rebel boy."

Enjolras obliged, his fingers latching onto the curve of her hips.

He had never been so happy in his life.

They didn't tell the others, and she still insulted him just as often, although often with more audible fond affection in her voice and a playful tousle of his curls, or a shove. They still walked everywhere together, and she always listened in on his speeches, but he'd teasingly rejoiced the day their usual walk had finally ended at his apartment and she'd begrudgingly admitted she couldn't find anything wrong with his final, ultimate plan.

There is only one thing wrong with the entire situation. Well, okay, two things: the monarchy, for one, but that was soon going to be fixed, Enjolras said, and the fact that one day, he will have to choose between staying with her, with their lazy days and her mischievous grins, or with fighting for Patria. Your country above all, he'd told his men, but then she would kiss the corner of his mouth and nip at his jaw and he would get lost trying to decipher the mysterious calligraphy sketched by the inky waves of her hair, and her dark eyes, whose depths he sought out to chart with an enthusiasm to rival any Portuguese explorer.

When news of General Lemarque's death had appeared over the dawn and the barricades were about to go up, he'd ordered her to stay at his apartment and wait for his return.

Of course she hadn't listened.

Had she really thought he wouldn't recognize those sweeping lashes, that curve of her cheek that he loved to kiss in the morning when she was half-awake, purring like a kitten into his chest, under that boy's cap and in those baggy clothes?

"You've called me stupid so often, you actually believe it now," he hissed into her ear, drawing her aside. "I told you to stay home."

"If I'm supposed to be equal to you, in this beautiful new Republic of yours, rebel boy," she drawled, undaunted by even his most ferocious of glares, "then why am I not allowed to fight alongside you?"

He didn't have an answer for her, but he still glared. " 'Ponine."

"Enjolras."

"Go home."

"Not without you. This is my war, too, rebel boy." Nobody has ever told Éponine Thénardier to do something that she didn't want to do and gotten away with it, and certainly not Enjolras.

In the smoke and gunpowder, the fierce set of her jaw and the fire in her eyes brought to mind Jeanne d'Arc, or even going further into history, an Amazon, wild and dangerous in her beauty, with her teeth slightly bared like a lioness as she brandished a pistol like she was born to hold a gun. Maybe, Enjolras thought from beside her, she was.

It was she who noticed Marius clambering up the barricade with the gunpowder, and it was she who followed, hissing curses and reminding him of his little blond Cosette, trying to retrieve him like Marius was simply a particularly bothersome straying puppy. And all the while, as the rest of Les Amis yelled, "Marius! Marius!", Enjolras was standing by the sidelines, his heart in his mouth, thinking "Éponine! Éponine!"

The crack of the rifle made him jump, made him feel as if he had been shot instead, as she fell down the barricade, the barricade he had called for, he had erected.

He ran to her side, pressing his hands to her wound, not caring if her blood smeared all over his hands – or perhaps he cared too much. "You will live, 'Ponine, I promise you, you will live-"

"_Menteur _," she coughed. "You always were an awful liar, especially to me."

He changed his speech then, as he always did, for her. "You'll be fine. Joly will fix you up, and you'll see the Republic, and you'll be with me –"

"You cannot save everyone, little rebel, haven't I told you that enough times?"

"I wanted to save you," he murmured. "Why, 'Ponine, why?" _For Marius, of all people? You died for him, but live for me. For us._

She seemed to sense his inner turmoil. "_Idiot _," she scoffs weakly. "I didn't do it for him, I did it for you. You were always going to have to choose," she said. Her voice is so, so tired, but it is still fierce with love.

" 'Ponine."

"Enjolras," she smiled, and it still hurt like a dagger in his ribs. "Give them hell for me, little rebel." She brushed a curl off his forehead with exquisite tenderness, fingertips skating across his skin in a final caress. He pressed a feather-light kiss to the bloody palm, and then she was gone.

The rain was very fitting to him – water extinguishes flame.

And he was glad, too, for it hid his tears as he lifted her up and put her alongside the rest of the fallen in the café, planting soft kisses of apology to her hairline.

The rest of the fight went in a blur of drizzle and ruined gunpowder, of a cow that wandered onto their side with its stupid gaze that he thought to himself she would have adored. When Le Cabuc shot his fellow revolutionary over a gambling trifle, it provided a welcome distraction.

He forced the man to his knees at Enjolras' feet, and gave them both one minute: a minute for one man to pray and for one to be astonished at the cruelty of man.

The sound of the gunshot made everyone flinch a minute later. Some of them, who had not been paying attention to the scuffle since they had been tending to the wounded or had been asleep, looked around in confusion. _Ask not for whom the bell tolls _, Enjolras thought wearily. _For it tolls for thee _.

When Gavroche died fetching more gunpowder from the bodies of dead soldiers – he has, no, had, the spunk of his sister, Enjolras thought to himself – and Combeferre wept over the tiny corpse, he thought,

"_You cannot save everyone, rebel boy _." And that was when he knew he was lost.

But he didn't tell his men that. They already knew. When their final dawn, the seventh day, approached, it was Combeferre who told him, "We have run out of time."

He looked at all of his fellow revolutionaries, the last of his men. It was not the time for glorious speeches – that time had passed. Instead, he glanced around them, and solemnly quoted, " '_Thus, though we cannot make our sun stand still, yet we shall make him run _.'" Jehan beamed, and the men tossed their caps and gave one last roar.

In the last battle, his friends fell, one by one. Jehan, their little poet. Courfeyrac. Combeferre. Joly. Bossuet, for some reason still alive at that point, even with his horrible luck. Feuilly, who had given his last fan away the night before. Lesgle. Pontmercy lost somewhere. Bahorel.

Just Grantaire left, and him. Dionysus, and Apollo.

Some fearless leader he was.

When he stood, at the balcony, with the flag clutched in his hands and more scarlet from the blood of the people who carried it than from the dye now, Grantaire by his side, he stared at the soldiers, jutting out his chin, holding his head high and defiantly.

When the bullets hit, tearing through his vest and into soft, vulnerable flesh, and he fell, the flag rushing with him in a gushing banner of red, he thought coherently, or perhaps heard her still say,

"_Idiot _. I did it for you."

The last thing he saw was the dawn of the new day.

Glossary

" L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers." – "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains"

Quel banane – what an idiot

Idiot – idiot/ fool

L'abaissé – the outcast, the poor, the downtrodden

Baiseur – fucker

Je t'emmerde – fuck you

Empoté – butterfingers

Disclaimer: I don't own _Les Misérables _, which belongs to Victor Hugo, nor do I own Rousseau's "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains," the opening lines from his _The Social Contract _, nor do I own _To His Coy Mistress _– Andrew Marvell takes that beauty. Nor do I own John Donne's _Meditation 17 _. Also, I don't take French. Therefore if there are missing accents or improper translations, please blame Clara (bagofbadgers). Kidding. Sort of.


End file.
